Editorial | Good prison news

There's good news and good news from the Kentucky Department of Corrections this week.

For the first time in nearly 30 years, the state is ending business with the private, for-profit prison industry, which has been the subject of allegations of poor services and mistreatment - including sexual abuse of women inmates at the now-closed Otter Creek Correctional Complex in Floyd County.

The state expects to have no offenders housed in a private prison, once it winds down its contract with the Marion Adjustment Center, Justice and Public Safety Secretary J. Michael Brown announced Tuesday. The contract expires Sunday.

And the other good news is that Kentucky's prison population, after years of runaway growth, has declined enough to allow the state to stop using for-profit prisons. The population is down from 22,102 last November to the current 20,591.

That's a hopeful sign that intended reforms of a 2011 law meant to reduce Kentucky's prison population - once the fastest-growing in the nation - are taking hold. House Bill 463 was designed to steer more low-level offenders out of prison and those with drug and alcohol problems into treatment.

Corrections officials need to work to continue reducing that number and lawmakers need to heed the words of Robert Lawson, a University of Kentucky law professor who for years has argued persuasively for an overhaul of the state's penal code that has contributed to exploding growth in Kentucky prisons and jails.

The work of the General Assembly isn't done when it comes to the state's patchwork system of criminal laws. HB 463 scratched the surface but it isn't even close to the major revision Professor Lawson and other criminal justice advocates have sought for years.

As states struggle with tight budgets and shrinking funds, keeping people out of prison - at a cost of about $21,700 per year per inmate - must remain a priority.

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Editorial | Good prison news

There's good news and good news from the Kentucky Department of Corrections this week.